John Merivale wears an Everite Military

Stanley Donen followed Charade with Arabesque (1966), another glossy thriller built around a reluctant academic and a woman nobody should trust. The prime minister of a Middle Eastern republic asks David Pollock (Gregory Peck), a specialist in hieroglyphics, to get inside the operation of the oil magnate Beshraavi (Alan Badel) and decode a secret message; Beshraavi takes Pollock hostage instead, and he escapes with the help of Yasmin (Sophia Loren), the magnate's mistress. Henry Mancini wrote the score. John Merivale plays Major Sylvester Pennington Sloane, the prime minister's military man inside the intrigue.

The watch attribution comes from a single French listing, which says Merivale wears an Everite and adds, by way of identification, only that it is a military watch, fitting for a Major. No frame accompanies the claim and no other publication has taken it up. The brand itself is real and pleasingly unglamorous: Everite was the house name of H. Samuel, the British mass-market jeweler founded in Liverpool in 1862, which sold affordable Swiss-made hand-wound watches under the label in its high-street shops. A high-street Everite on a British officer is entirely plausible costuming for 1966, and that is as far as the evidence goes.